


Likely Girl, Dreaming

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Sail, F/M, Female POV, female character of colour, missing voices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-08-31 05:24:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8565709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: They say every man is a hero of his own tale. They don’t say which man is the hero of mine.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to alltoseek for suggesting the point of view and hunting down the relevant passages from the books.  
> Note: The characters’ ages are unclear in canon but they are probably underage by modern standards.

* * *

 

I stand in the Dispensary, one hand pressed to the small of my back as I pound at a mortar of cochineal and chalk. When I have ground it to powder, it will make a week’s stock of pink-stained pills for Father Luke to cure the stomach ache and ease the bloody flux.

I have a bundle of feathers and beads ready in my apron pocket as well, though, with leather purses to tie them into. The Christian priests make their charms of words alone and sometimes patients need more to hold to than that, especially in a year like this when the rains are late and the crops lie withered in the dust.

“Are you almost done in there, Sal?” Father Luke calls from the next room, his voice echoing off the whitewashed brick.

“Yes, sir. Almost done, sir,” I say quickly. Smart, obedient and too useful to be turned away, or so I hope.

Sal isn’t my real name, of course, but the Fathers couldn’t pronounce that even if they tried. I don’t mind. Sarah (shortened to Sally for everyday use) comes from their holy book, so it has a powerful magic of its own, and I need every scrap of power I can get.

I press my hand to my belly and feel the child moving. He is small for eight months but he is already trying to kick his way out. Small but determined. Like his father, I suppose. Like me. Definitely like me.

I don’t remember his father very clearly. I don’t suppose he remembers me at all.

 

* * *

 

He was on the quayside when I first saw him. A skinny boy about my own age, lying drunk in a wheelbarrow, decked out in the costume that marked him as a lordling. An “officer”, they called it. Officer was a word worth knowing. I didn’t pay much attention to him, just to the fact that, with most of the sailors busy hauling him into one of their boats, I could slip unnoticed into the other and be pulled across to the ship.

The man who had picked me out from the crowd of girls that night wasn’t a kind man. Often they were, surprisingly often. They would take their money’s worth, no doubt of that, but they would buy me food, too, or press trinkets into my hands. They were, like me, a long way from home. Sometimes, though, they were rougher than they needed to be. The man that night was a bully, a blowhard who thought he would make himself popular by passing me around his mates. He had paid me once and he reckoned once was enough. We both knew there wasn’t much I could do about it – one girl against six men – but I kicked and yelled anyway, and I had my teeth hard against his shoulder, trying to bite down, when there was a sudden sharp cry and he was yanked off me so hard that I stumbled to the deck.

His mates were holding him back, shaking sense into him, pulling him away from the young officer, who stood there pale and unsteady and furious. It must have been his shout I had heard, the high cracked voice of a half-grown boy. He extended his hand to me and made a show of helping me up, taking my arm, turning me away from the crowd of cowed, shamed men. He led me down a hatchway into the belly of the ship, into a rowdy world of drunken, swaying dancers and hard-eyed women, where we had to tread between half-clad bodies coupling desperately amongst the barrels and tables and guns.

Down another ladder, then another, until the shouting and singing blurred into echoes. It was dark down there, the only light seeping from the hatchway by which we had entered. The boy helped me over the heaps of rope that lay coiled there, tugging at my hand until we were hidden behind the tallest stack. He had been murmuring soothingly at me all this time but finally he grasped from my lack of reply that his words had made no sense to me. He pointed to himself.

“Jack,” he said. “Jack Aubrey. You?”

To him it must have seemed a simple question. I hesitated. The girl I had been or the girl I was now? The girl he wanted me to be?

“Sally,” I said at last. “Sally Mputa.”

The last bit of that, at least, was true.

 

* * *

 

He had long straight hair like parched grass, that much I do remember. Pale hair and pale skin like a dead thing. I used to untie his plait and pull the strands across to hide his face, until it reminded me of the straw-edged masks of the young men in my village when they danced for rain.

Three days he kept me in the cable-tier. He brought me food every day: plain leavened bread and boiled meat that tasted only of salt. He lay with me a few times, clumsy and gentle, and I let him.

It isn’t that I didn’t have choices. I could have run, could have left in a bum-boat with the other whores. I could have found other men or made the long trek back to my village, to my elderly husband and his compound full of skinny goats and bloat-bellied children. He hadn’t been unkind, hadn’t beaten me much, and his other wives only pinched me if I glanced up too long from my chores.

This boy, though, he was kind to me, as well as he knew how. He kissed me after he coupled with me, and he smiled and blushed when I toyed with his dead-grass hair. He brought me a whale tooth he had carved into a likeness of his ship, with little marks underneath by which he spelled out its name to me. He hung the tooth around my neck as if that alone might save me.

Other men knew I was there, of course. Sometimes they would peer down the hatchway, their shoulders blocking the light, and sometimes it would be lads of his own age, laughing and nudging him. He didn’t let any of them touch me.

I knew it couldn’t last, although the end seemed to come as a shock to him. He wept like a child when I was dragged out from the cable-tier under the captain’s eye, and he wept more when I was put over the side into a bum-boat and carried back to shore.

I don’t know what they did to him after that. Not much, I suppose. He was an officer, after all.

 

* * *

 

The chalk is reduced to powder now and the powder is pressed into tablets, neatly stacked in their tin. I ought to call Father Luke for my next chore.

He is a kind man, too, and a long way from home. He tells me often of his own land, where the grass is always green and the rainy season lasts all year. I don’t know that I believe him entirely, but there is a strange kind of sense in it. I suppose that is what makes his god so potent: the god of the rains, with herds thousand-strong, spreading his power across the world like a stain.

I shall give my child a Biblical name too, when he kicks his way out. “Samuel”, perhaps. “ _God has heard me_ ”: a good name. He will be gentle and brave like his father, and strong and dark like me, and some day he will have a flock of thousands.

I stand with my hand on my belly and dream of rain.

 


End file.
